Section:GDN 1J PaGe:10 Edition Date:190730 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 17:42 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Tuesday 30 July 2019
10
In addition to spreading disease, wild
boar each year cause thousands of road
accidents. In January, a group of wild boar
crossed a highway south of Milan, leading to a three-
car pile-up which killed one driver and injured several
more. The boar destroy property, devour ground-nesting
animals – including endangered turtles’ eggs – and crops,
such as fragile vine roots and shoots. Italian farmers
estimate the boar infl ict €100m (£90m) worth of crop
damage annually. As the animals’ toll on public health
and the economy climbs, communities from Texas to
New South Wales have begun to wage war on the species- a campaign fought in public parks, on golf courses, on
farmland and on street corners at dusk.
It was in 2014, when this species seriously threatened
the global pork industry, that the boar’s presence went
from nuisance to existential threat. Boars can carry
African swine fever (ASF), an incurable and highly
contagious virus. Known as “ pig ebola ”, it kills wild and
domestic pigs, creating an animal health crisis that is
rapidly becoming a geopolitical one. To save the bacon
from ASF, countries have been erecting physical borders
with neighbours, threatening embargos, incinerating
millions of farmyard pigs and off ering bounties for the
culling of wild boar.
A European consortium of wildlife experts,
conservationists and healthcare experts, Enetwild , has,
since 2017, been tasked with leading research into the
link between wild boar and ASF. “The wild boar problem
has been progressing for decades,” says Joaqu ín Vicente
Baños , a Spanish scientist and coordinator of Enetwild.
“It’s just that now we are seeing the consequences.”
Wild boar now number more than 10m in the EU, the
group says. “Confl icts between humans and wild boar
will increase,” says Baños. The numbers are putting
more pressure on cities to manage the population of
a pest that’s bigger than a rat, with behaviours more
complex than a pigeon or stray cat.
Boar eradication strategies have been trialled,
including contraception, poison and selective culling.
In Berlin, the city pays a team of stadtjäger , or trained
street hunters, to pick off nuisance wild boar within city
limits. In rural Texas, they use helicopters to fl ush the
wild hogs into the open. A marksman, fl ying shotgun,
picks them off one by one. “It’s expensive on a per-hour
basis,” says Michael J Bodenchuk , a wildlife biologist
and director of Texas Wildlife Services, a division of
the US Department of Agriculture, who often does the
shooting. “But cheap on a per-pig basis. Because we’ve
got so many pigs!”
Barcelona takes a diff erent approach. Shortly after
the calamitous 2013 police shooting, the city hired a
team of veterinary scientists from the Autonomous
University of Barcelona (UAB). The vets practise a
form of wildlife management on the streets of one of
Europe’s most densely-populated cities. Their duties
involve pre-planned kills – targeting females in their
prime reproductive years and their young, rather than
adult males – they also accompany police on late-night
calls in case they are needed to euthanise a boar. During
the day, they conduct citizen outreach eff orts and
supply data and reports to city offi cials about waste
management and where the city is falling behind on
trimming vegetation along roads, parks and squares.
The eff ect of this partnership is that boar-human
clashes in Barcelona have fallen by more than half,
results that are gaining attention across Europe.
But while scientists and conservationists see real
promise in the Barcelona programme, politics and
public opinion might just sink it. Brussels last year
rejected a UAB-led funding request that, the team
hoped, would lead to an EU-wide plan to manage the
urban boar problem along the lines of the Barcelona
model. Jorge Ramón López Olvera, the UAB vet scientist
managing the programme, told me his contract with
Barcelona, which expires in 18 months, hinges on the
whims of city hall. Urban boar are a new urban issue,
Olvera says, one that is confounding and dividing city
dwellers. Homeowners want them off their street.
Animal rights activists want them relocated in a
humane way. Hunters prefer the status quo, while
politicians just want the problem to go away. And they
don’t all agree on whether Olvera’s methods are best
for Barcelona. After six years on the job, Olvera has
learned that what to do about the boar has become an
emotionally charged question. “It’s a human-to-human
confl ict as much as a human-to-wildlife one,” he says.One evening in late May , Olvera picked me up in a
beat-up Dacia Logan station wagon with a blowgun
in the back and enough drugs to knock out a charging
elephant. We drove to Llars Mundet on the periphery
of Collserola. Within its 14 wooded hectares there are
public-housing projects, a sports complex, a senior-care
home, a primary school and the Universitat de Barcelona
campus, where residents and staff endure frequent
unwelcome visits from families of wild boar.
We came across a white van parked in a clearing.
It belonged to Estrateko, a local animal control fi rm
that works with Olvera’s team. A few metres beyond,
suspended above the ground, was a drop-net trap
that Estrateko had set up , and a circle of corn feed
strategically placed below the netting. They had rigged
the trap with a wifi -enabled trigger. All the boar action- if there were any – could be viewed on a private app
from a smartphone or tablet. Swipe right on the app and
a signal would trigger the release of the trap’s central
spring, dropping the 10- by-10-metre net on the ground,
ensnaring any animals below. The plan was to catch two
boar families after dark.
I took a seat in the front of the van, with Enric Vila
from Estrateko and a scientist, the Catalan naturalist
Jordi Baucells Colomer. These catch-and-kill stakeouts
are scheduled at night when there are more boar than
people about. I didn’t know what to expect. But when
I spied a cyclist, then a jogger and then dog-walkers
from my vantage point in the van, the whole hunting
vibe vanished.
Just then Vila pointed. “Senglar!” (Catalan for boar),
he whispered excitedly. Two sturdy females and eight
striped piglets were directly in front of us. A lone female
tentatively approached the bait. The others hung back.
Vila predicted they wouldn’t go for it. Sure enough, they
all trotted off. A few minutes later, however, an even
larger group arrived. And then something surprising
happened: a third group, unknown to my fellow van
passengers, showed up. A confrontation between the
two groups – more than 20 boars in all – broke out.
The original group protected its turf, chasing off the
newcomers. This was n ot going to plan.
Olvera and his colleagues are not exterminators. The
car is property of UAB where, as a professor of veterinary
science, Olvera teaches undergraduates and is part of
the department’s wildlife ecology and health group. The
unit outsources its expertise to municipalities and local
fi rms. Olvera’s boar work is complex, if only because
there are so many humans to contend with. Planning
meetings with alarmed business and property owners
can get animated, as can gatherings with hunters who
don’t always care for hunting tips from “the university
guys”. Animal rights activists would like nothing more
than to shut the boar-catching operation down. Olvera’s
philosophy is to keep a low profi le.
But it is clear Olvera, a native Barcelonan with a
cyclist’s build and a near endless reserve of energy,
likes to talk about boar. He shares with me tales of the
more than 300 emergency calls they have responded to
in the past six years. There was the time a frisky male
descended into the heart of the city, appearing in Plaza
Catalunya just as the clubs shut for the night. Carles
Conejero Fuentes, the youngest member of Olvera’s
team at 28, took care of that situation. (The clubbers,
mostly inebriated, failed to notice the 49kg animal in
their midst, Fuentes said.) Gregorio Mentaberre, Olvera’s
friend and colleague for 20 years, had a close call when
one charged him in an alley. He leapt out of its path and
felt the animal graze his leg, before recovering enough to
take aim with his blow-dart.
Olvera, 43, seems to get the trickiest calls, including
when police, in the small hours of the morning, had to
shut down a major roadway outside the CosmoCaixa
science museum because a group repeatedly zipped
across a grassy central reservation into east- and west-
bound traffi c. Olvera had trouble with one particular
boar that he couldn’t get out of the road. He and an
offi cer approached it in the Dacia at low speed. The
offi cer grabbed hold of the steering wheel as Olvera
leaned out the window, steadied the blow pipe and
forced from his lungs a burst of air. The tranquilli ser dart
s ank into the boar’s fl eshy backside.
Once the boars are incapacitated, blood tests are
taken. They are then euthanised on the spot. Autopsies
are performed the next day in a lab at UAB. Blood tests
indicate the overall health of the boar population and
whether they pose a risk to the public.
Olvera views the city as a giant laboratory, and the
boar an indicator of Barcelona’s ecological health. He is
collaborating with Jordi Serra Cobo, a Spanish biologist
famous for his work on how viruses make the leap from
animals to humans. The two were introduced by an
offi cial in city hall. They want to know how many urban
boar carry hepatitis E, and what that means to humans.
In the blood tests of city-caught boar , they see worrying
seasonal up-ticks; 44% carried hepatitis E this spring.
Olvera calls the work a potential early warning system
for the city. “Wild boars are pissing and defecating in city
parks where children play. If children can get sick, we
want to know before it becomes a problem,” he says.
The boar management plan relies heavily on the data
they collect on population size and migration patterns. A
major objective is to identify the “boar corridors” – feeder
roads and paths into town – and halt their movements
from Collserola, their natural habitat, to the bustling
city streets below. They can now predict where the boar
are likely to appear next during the May-to-September
high season. They build heat maps by gauging numerous
factors including rainfall, temperature levels (hot, dry
conditions tend to send adults on a quest into the city
for shade, food and water) and matching that with police
phone logs of citizen boar sightings.
It is not enough to track and trap boar where the city
meets nature. Since 2013, the UAB team has been on the
street almost daily. They are on call round the clock. They
also work closely with city offi cials to make rubbish bins
and park entrances boar-tight. They run an education
campaign, visiting school children and talking to park-
goers to explain the need to keep food waste contained,
and to keep a safe distance should they encounter, say,
an unpredictable sow with her cute piglets in tow (no
selfi es!). Last year, boar pest calls fell to 480 – a 60% drop
from 2016. Olvera is cautiously optimistic the situation is
coming under control. “We are eff ectively chasing them
back into the forest now,” he says.Across much of the world , the wild boar population
has exploded since the 1980s, coinciding with the
arrival of warmer winters, the improved crop yields
of industrialised farming and the declining number of
predators, including hunters. The boar’s adaptability
and intelligence make them one of the most prolifi c large
mammals on Earth.
Young sows can produce as many as two litters per
year, averaging 5-6 piglets – and as many as 14 – per
brood. Boar become sexually mature when they reach
about 35kg. If food supplies are plentiful early in life,
females reach breeding age well before their fi rstThe boar’s adaptability and
intelligence make them one of the
most prolifi c mammals on Earth
Aiming a
tranquilliser
dart at a family
of boars in
Barcelona
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